Best Shopify Alternatives Of 2025

Shift4Shop has much more going for it than you might think at first glance. After all, this Shopify competitor powers big names like The UPS Store, The Honey Baked Ham Co. and Hammacher Schlemmer. Its primary focus is on simplifying e-commerce pricing plans so business owners can focus on business, not worrying about whether their current pricing plan has enough server resources or e-commerce features.

That said, the biggest hurdle to starting with Shift4Shop might be the sign-up process. While it should be simple, the verification process can get stuck in a code loop, and your initial e-commerce store login to set up your password frequently errors out, requiring help from customer service.

A Shift4Shop plan is free if you process $1,000 or more through ShiftPayments each month. Otherwise, it’s $39 monthly if you don’t reach that threshold or use PayPal for payment processing. However, like Shopify and other e-commerce platforms, additional functions from third-party apps may cost extra.

Thanks to CSS editing capability, Shift4Shop’s customization options are good. However, while product setup and actual store controls have great pop-up tours to guide you through the process, I found that the theme customization can encounter errors during the initial setup, requiring a new theme installation in order to edit.

Shopify (left) includes some SEO tools but mostly relies on third-party apps, while Shift4Shop (right) includes a unified SEO dashboard.

However, the standout features of Shift4Shop are the marketing and SEO tools. Where most e-commerce platforms struggle, Shift4Shop aims for best-in-industry status for SEO, and it is certainly the best Shopify alternative for that category. Google AMP pages for products, Robots.txt file access, alt text, meta description, customizable breadcrumbs, canonical URLs and Schema.org markup are just some of the SEO tools available.

Learn more: Read our full Shift4Shop review.

Shopify may be popular, but many Shopify merchants find that its pricing plans, add-ons and additional transaction fees (when you don’t use Shopify Payments) can easily eat their budget when just starting out. In comparison, Ecwid by Lightspeed is a flexible, beginner-friendly and streamlined platform with lower costs.

Admittedly, Lightspeed has shaken up Ecwid’s pricing as of early 2025, and it isn’t quite the bargain it once was. However, it is still less expensive than many other options, especially when compared to other free e-commerce platforms, such as Adobe Commerce (formerly Magento Open Source) and WooCommerce, which require separate hosting. For example, while Ecwid discontinued its free plan in March 2025, new plans start as low as $5 monthly, with the top-tier paid plan costing $130 monthly. That’s a stark contrast to Shopify’s top plan, which costs $2,300 monthly (paid in three-year chunks).

For those new to e-commerce, Ecwid is beginner-friendly, with a well-designed, user-friendly interface that makes building your first online store straightforward. A visual website builder is included, and basic customization is intuitively managed. However, the checkout setup is a bit trickier.

Shopify (left) allows you to embed a single product with a “buy now” button that redirects to your Shopify store, while Ecwid (right) allows you to embed your entire store.

One of my favorite Ecwid features is store embedding. If you already have a website, or have just fallen in love with one of the best website builders, you can have your cake and eat it, too. Ecwid provides code to embed your Ecwid commerce store into any other website that allows custom code injections. You don’t have to understand coding; it’s as simple as copy/paste.

That easy embedding feature makes Ecwid extremely portable, gives you a wide choice of the best website hosting providers and lets you make free website builders, such as Google Sites and HubSpot, e-commerce capable.

Learn more: Read our full Shopify vs. Ecwid comparison.

Shopify streamlines online store creation and offers a large suite of tools, but design customization often gets lost in the process. Wix, as a generalist platform with e-commerce capabilities, offers shop owners much more freedom and control over how online stores look, thanks to its extensive customization options. Personally, I see this as a great strength when it is more important than ever to differentiate yourself in a crowded marketplace.

With two builders to choose from, Classic and the more advanced Studio, Wix gives DIYers and agencies the power needed to create truly customized e-commerce stores that don’t look like cookie-cutter copies of hundreds of other online stores.

On the other hand, the choice of two builders comes with a frustratingly fractured knowledge base, and Studio builder-specific tutorials are often difficult to locate. Similar to Shopify, some small business owners without a tech background may find they need to hire help for some website design functions. However, both platforms offer connections to platform specialists.

Additionally, both e-commerce platforms offer plans starting under $40 monthly and pricing tiers that scale up to enterprise-level. However, while Wix e-commerce has more lower-price plan options with fewer add-on costs overall, Shopify offers an introductory bare-bones social media, messaging and simple store plan for $5 monthly.

Shopify (left) only offers a few free shop themes, while Wix (right) offers hundreds.

Wix offers a strong suite of design and e-commerce tools, including open APIs. It has far more free online store templates (over 500) than Shopify, which only offers 13 free online store themes with paid themes starting at a pricey $100. While Shopify provides more third-party integrations, Wix still offers a strong app market with over 500 integrations to choose from.

Learn more: Read our full Shopify vs. Wix comparison.

One of the stronger Shopify competitors is BigCommerce. Like Shopify offers Shopify Plus for enterprise companies, BigCommerce offers two e-commerce platforms: the Enterprise system and the Essentials system for small businesses. While it doesn’t present itself in a sleek and flashy fashion like Shopify, BigCommerce Essentials is a powerful e-commerce platform with great extra e-commerce features missing from other platforms.

For example, BigCommerce Essentials supports multiple storefronts where Zoho Commerce doesn’t, and Salesforce Commerce Cloud doesn’t offer special transaction fee rates with select payment processors like BigCommerce does.

Compared specifically to Shopify, BigCommerce hits it out of the park with multiple storefront support (a small additional fee per storefront) and matches the POS integration on every plan. It also offers unlimited file storage and unlimited bandwidth, although pricing plans are slightly more expensive.

Also, with 1,230 third-party app choices in the BigCommerce app store and the ability to connect BigCommerce with Zapier, adding over 7,000 apps, BigCommerce is one of the few e-commerce platforms that can go head-to-head with Shopify’s integration ecosystem.

While Shopify (left) has a large number of payment processor options, BigCommerce (right) offers transaction fee discounts with certain partner processors.

Now, all that may sound like a wash that puts the two e-commerce platforms fairly neck and neck. However, BigCommerce’s biggest standout feature is 24/7 live chat and phone customer support.

It’s far too rare to find instant phone access for help with your e-commerce store, especially when a glitch or sudden downtime could spell disaster on a big shopping day like Black Friday. Many Shopify merchants are all too familiar with the panic of not having access to any phone support, as it’s only available on the top-tier pricing plan.

Learn more: Read our full BigCommerce Essentials review.

If the thought of doing more than changing the color scheme on a website template makes you sick to your stomach, Squarespace (not to be confused with Square Online) is probably for you. While Shopify offers more customization than Squarespace, Squarespace’s AI-augmented store builder takes a lot of the initial adjustments off DIYers to make creating your first online store easier.

Squarespace also has more free themes than Shopify, even if some look a bit dated. The AI tools help customize pages and sections needed for your website and even assist in boring, repetitive tasks such as alt text generation. That said, Squarespace’s AI tool selection isn’t as deep as Shopify’s, but the ones there to assist with repetitive tasks, such as product descriptions and SEO, are spot on.

I’m particularly fond of the monetization and e-commerce blogging tools Squarespace offers. For content creators, the ability to paywall content, videos and tutorials by individual page or as a series of items is a welcome tool. Subscription management is also included. Those are tools many e-commerce and blogging platforms skimp on.

While Shopify (left) and Squarespace (right) both have AI text tools, Shopify lacks a native paywall feature.

It is worth noting that while Squarespace’s plan prices are significantly lower across the board than Shopify’s options, Squarespace applies transaction fees on top of plan rates regardless of payment processor, while Shopify only adds transaction fees if you use a third-party payment processor.

Learn more: Read our full Squarespace review.